Concluding the series of our Mega Roundups we would like to offer you an extensive testing of 16 hard disk drives with the storage capacity of 200GB and more. Here we will take a closer look at the solutions from Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital.

Performance in FC-Test

We use FC-Test according to our standard methodology. We create two 32GB partitions on the drive and format them in NTFS and then in FAT32. Next we create a set of files on the first volume, read it from the drive, copy it into a folder on the first partition (i.e. we copy files within one partition), and then copy it into another partition. FC-Test 1.0 build 11 has one important improvement over the older version – now the utility reboots the testbed after each test action, so we prevent the results from being influenced by the file caching performed by the operating system. We use five file patterns:

Install (414 files, 575MB total size);

ISO (3 files, 1.6GB total size);

MP3 (271 file, 1GB total size);

Programs (8504 files, 1.4GB total size);

Windows (9006 files, 1.06GB total size).

Let’s start with the NTFS file system. Because of the so many drives included, we will be discussing the results by each action for each file pattern. The first action is the creation of a file pattern on the disc.

The following diagram shows the speed of the creation of the Install pattern:

The Maxtor drives occupied the top four positions, like in the WinBench tests. Behind the leading group, there’s tough competition going on: the Hitachi HDS722525VLAT80 and the Seagate ST3200822AS have almost identical results. The Maxtor 5A300J0 and the WD2000JB grappled with each other – youth won.

Let’s see how these results change in ISO and MP3 patterns that consist of bigger files.

The drives from Maxtor are beyond competition as concerns creating big files. The drives from Hitachi sank to the lower part of the diagram. The two Seagates are firmly seated in their fifth and sixth places, while the slow Maxtor 5A300J0 is successfully challenging the drives from Western Digital.

The remaining patterns – Programs and Windows – consist of many small files.

The Maxtors maintain their advantage at creating small files, but the Hitachi team is close behind them. The drives from Seagate are rather bad at such kind of work: the ST3200822A plummets to the bottom of the diagram in the Programs pattern and the ST3200822AS does the same in the Windows file-set.